The moment of truth is here for Ruto

In September last year, I imagined in this column a key moment in the 2022 presidential election race when the distance between the two frontrunners would get narrower and narrower.

Then, Deputy President William Ruto, riding the wave of a high-resonance of the Hustler Nation rhetoric in Mt Kenya, was showing ODM party leader Raila Odinga a clean pair heels.

Pollsters gave the DP a double-digit lead over Mr Odinga, who was still licking his wounds inflicted the previous month by Court of Appeal judges blocking the BBI constitutional reforms a second time.

With any lingering hopes of enticing his former allies in the defunct National Super Alliance (Nasa) with plum jobs in another pre-election power-sharing agreement dashed, Mr Odinga looked set to fall further behind in the race. But I thought it was still too early to rule him out, citing his record of not having lost any direct duel with Dr Ruto.

For his part, Dr Ruto struck me as being too predictable in his tactics, having deployed the same old tribal scaremongering Mr Odinga’s past opponents have amplified to rally voters in Mt Kenya against his bids.

He had also given away deep-seated apprehensiveness about the Raila curse, declaring at a public meeting that “you can’t chase me from ODM and then follow me to Jubilee and chase me again”.

Public display of invincibility

Even in the 2022 presidential race, there was bound to be some stage when he would start looking over his shoulders nervously despite his public display of invisibility.

Well, that moment of truth has arrived.

With recent polls showing Mr Odinga has overtaken him in popularity ratings, Dr Ruto has increasingly become querulous, conjuring up one conspiracy theory about a rigging scheme after another.

When he is not complaining about the media allegedly decampaigning him, he is telling foreign envoys about some Deep State mandarins supposedly transferring 800,000 or one million registered voters from his political strongholds!

To its credit, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has demonstrated responsiveness, reassuring both Dr Ruto and Mr Odinga about its commitment to a free, fair and credible election. It remains to be seen whether IEBC will succeed in exorcising the ghosts of rigging that the Kenya Kwanza presidential candidate appears to be seeing everywhere.

Yet if Dr Ruto ends up losing the August 9 race, it will be down to the fact that he is running on the wrong side of history.

In January 2021, President Uhuru Kenyatta set the tone for inclusion and diversity in this election, saying he would prefer a situation where his successor comes from a community other than the two that have produced presidents.

The nomination of Martha Karua as Mr Odinga’s running mate and potential first female Deputy President on May 16 this year not only changed the game for Dr Ruto in Mt Kenya, but it also increased the weight of history against his presidential run.

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